from the just-as-Techdirt-predicted dept

For many years now, Western governments have been complaining about China's supposed lack of respect for intellectual monopolies, and constantly pushing the country's politicians to tighten the legal framework protecting them. To anyone not blinded by an unquestioning belief in the virtues of copyright and patent maximalism, it was pretty clear where this strategy would end. Indeed, over five years ago, Mike warned where this was leading: towards China repeatedly punishing foreign companies to protect domestic Chinese firms -- in other words, leveraging patents as a tool for protectionism. A post on the IAM blog about legal action taken by the Chinese company BYD, one of Apple's suppliers, shows that Techdirt's predictions are well on the way to being realized:

Apple says BYD filed a pair of patent infringement suits in the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court alleging that the antennae in the iPhone 6 plus and various other Apple products infringe BYD’s intellectual property.

Five other defendants working with Apple were also sued -- four Chinese suppliers, and one Chinese distributor.

In effect, this is a patent attack on Apple's supply chain in China, and one that would be devastating for the US company if successful. The IAM post points out:

Of the seven final assembly facilities for iPhones, only one is outside of China (a Foxconn facility in Sao Paolo, Brazil). That means any company with valid Chinese patents that it thinks reads on Apple products potentially has a lot of leverage.

There are two crucial elements that make Apple so vulnerable here. First, the fact that its assembly facilities are concentrated in China, and secondly, because there's a Chinese company with patents it thinks it can use against Apple in that country. A March 2014 press release from BYD boasted that it had already amassed more than 12,000 domestic patents and over 8,000 international ones; the figures today are doubtless much higher. Amongst those domestic patents there are probably many that could come in handy for future legal action against other Western companies that assemble their products in China.

Those in the West who pushed China to show more "respect" for patents must be feeling so proud of the progress that Chinese companies have made in this regard, and so pleased now to see Apple being sued in local courts using China's patent laws.

from the wow dept

This is pretty big. Last month, we wrote about a This American Life episode that focused on the Foxconn factories where Apple products are made, based on a one-man show by Mike Daisey. I wrote about a few key points in the episode -- including some of the more interesting claims from those who were used to "fact check" his story. Apparently, that fact check did not go nearly far enough. Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who is quite familiar with the factories in China, found large parts of the story questionable, and did some followup reporting, finding Daisey's translator and discovering that things Daisey said turned out not to be true. He then confronted Daisey with Ira Glass from TAL, and got Daisey to admit that he fabricated parts of the story, though he still appears to be in denial about how bad this looks:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic - not a theatrical - enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

The problem, of course, is that it now appears that many of the things he was claiming weren't actually true of the plants he wrote about. There was one story that recounted events that did happen, but at a different plant 1,000 miles away, and which Daisey did not witness at all.

In the meantime, This American Life has retracted the entire show (link is down as of right now), and apparently plans to air a new show today that details what happened and has a detailed apology from Ira Glass (who just recently on the show was telling listeners to go see Daisey's full one man show).

It is true that Daisey is a storyteller, not a reporter, and that's fine in the right context. But once it got to the point that journalistic outfits were reporting on his story -- or even letting him repeat it on the air, he had every responsibility to be clear about the parts that were simply fabricated.

That tension between the undeniably desirable products and the not-so-glamorous conditions under which they are made powers a monologue by Mike Daisey, entitled "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," which we discussed last month, and described by the New York Times as:

a mind-clouding, eye-opening exploration of the moral choices we unknowingly or unthinkingly make when we purchase nifty little gadgets like the iPhone and the iPad and the PowerBook.

This is someone who had an opportunity to transform the world with these devices and then did. He started as someone whose devices were forged out of piracy, and today it’s the most locked-down computer company in the world. As a capitalist I’m sure that it’s very attractive. But if we’re talking about him as an artist, I’d say that he completely lost track of his ideals.

Given that jaundiced view of "the most locked-down computer company in the world", it perhaps shouldn't be too much of a surprise to discover that Daisey the artist is trying to stay true to his own ideals by opening up his work to everyone, not just to download, but to perform:

after nearly 200 performances, the monologuist Mike Daisey was to release a theatrical transcript of his latest one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” through his Web site, mikedaisey.blogspot.com. It will be free to download and in a rare twist, if an aspiring performer should want to mount a production of the show, Mr. Daisey will not ask for payment.

Rare indeed. Given Jobs' allergic reaction to letting people 'do what they want' without significant limits or tollbooths, would he have approved?

from the take-a-listen dept

This week is the big Consumer Electronics Show -- and, like many in the tech field, I'm here in Las Vegas exploring the various gadgets that are coming out. Many (some might say most, though I'm not sure that's true) of the gadgets here are made in China. So it's interesting timing that the always excellent radio program This American Life chose this particular week to run its episode on what happens in the electronics factories in Shenzen, China. Most of the episode involves a rather gripping story from storyteller Mike Daisey (who first came to fame almost exactly a decade ago talking about his life working at Amazon.com). Daisey's latest one-man show is all about Apple and Steve Jobs -- and this segment was adapted from a part of that show. The second act of the show involves This American Life host Ira Glass, looking to fact check many of the claims that Daisey makes -- many of which do, in fact, seem to check out. Of course, the two biggest companies at the center of the story -- Apple and the infamous Foxconn -- refuse to take part. The whole thing is worth listening to, in part because Daisey really is a fantastic storyteller (something I didn't think was true a decade ago, but as I think he's gotten progressively better over the years).

While I won't go into all of the details of the story, there were two separate points that I found especially interesting. The first was what maybe seemed like a minor aside in Daisey's monologue: that almost all the work done in these factories is done by hand. He noted that, in his imagination, if he ever really thought about these plants, he imagined them being like the robotic Japanese auto plants he'd seen videos about years ago -- only the robots would be smaller, since the gadgets are smaller than cars. But, the truth is that everything is done by hand -- and that's, in part, because labor is so ridiculously cheap in China. And then he notes that we always hear people who decry the fact that everything is mass produced by these machines, and clamor for handmade products. And he notes that, perhaps, we don't really want handmade products -- because all these gadgets really are handmade, and it's not a pleasant experience.

The second point, however, goes in a different direction. It comes during the "fact check" portion of the show, in which multiple observers -- including Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof -- note that, for as bad as the factories may seem relative to what we have today in the US, the conditions and opportunities are significantly better than where those workers came from. Furthermore, another commentator notes, over the last few years, conditions at these plants has been improving -- and it isn't necessarily because of pressure from companies or the government instituting any kind of labor reforms. It is, instead, because competition for workers has increased -- and turnover is massive: in some cases upwards of 20% per month. That's an insane level of turnover -- and a costly one. Even in a "sweatshop" type setting, the costs of replacing a worker can be high, and the end result is that these companies do have incentives to improve, and to offer a better deal and better conditions in factories. None of this is to excuse the dangerous working conditions (in some cases easily avoidable), the physical neglect of employees, or the occasional employment of under-age workers. But it does make you wonder what the "solution" to all of this would be. Daisey says the answer is labor standards -- and that may very well be a workable solution. But it might also mean that some of the workers, who start from the same place as those who were able to build themselves up from incredibly poor to a form of middle class, might never get that chance.

It's a situation where there certainly aren't easy answers. Personally, I think that if there were more transparency (and perhaps shows like this one can help), that could drive social pressure to improve the worst of the worst working conditions, as companies should be reasonably ashamed for abusing their employees'. And that level of transparency itself can come from social pressure. Indeed, while Apple and Foxconn refused to take part in the show, Apple (at least) has been continuously pressured to be more transparent about these things, and (as the episode notes) in some ways it does do a lot more than other companies -- though many would argue not nearly enough. In the end, hopefully pressure both from competitive forces for workers along with public pressure to stop horrible treatment can lead to a situation where the conditions in these factories really do significantly improve. And maybe, in the end, that actually does lead to more automation, and the miniaturized robotic automobile factories Daisey imagined. And then people can really complain about a lack of handmade goods. But, it might just be better for the employees themselves in the long run.